Trailers used to haul cargo include a variety of electrical devices. In particular, they include a variety of lights that are placed for safety or legal reasons. These include tail lights, brake lights, turn lights, reverse lights, dome lights, clearance lights, side lights, etc. It is important that these lights remain functional for the operation of the trailer to be safe.
Trailer lighting can fail for a variety of reasons, however, whether that be a slow decay in the efficiency of an LED, a sudden short circuit caused by water intrusion into a lamp, or a sudden open circuit caused by a burnt-out filament or a dead LED.
For safety and legal reasons, the operator of a trailer needs to know when a failure occurs, or is about to occur.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a means for the driver to determine when a failure has occurred on one of the lights on the trailer, or when a failure is about to occur.
One solution to this problem is the use of current and voltage sensing circuit placed between a driver and a trailer that continually monitors the current and voltage on each of the lighting circuits, and alerts the operator when a fault is found.